Bill Cosby’s Lawyer Compares His Alleged Rape Victims to a Lynch Mob
Bill Cosby's lawyer Monique Pressley had a busy Friday, making the media rounds to once again deny that her client had ever raped or sexually assaulted even one of the 46 women who have publicly accused him of doing so.
On CNN, Pressley compared the women to a lynch mob, saying Cosby is being unfairly raked through the mud.
"Through the decades, we have seen what we used to call lynch mobs, where people turned and pointed the finger at one person and accused that one person of doing something that they did not do, and they were filed into the court, one after another, to say, 'He did it, he did it, she did it, she did it' when it was not the case,” Pressley told CNN's Ashleigh Banfield. "That happened often in the ’60s and ’70s in this country."
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By the time she got to HuffPost Live, Cosby's accusers were no longer a lynch mob, but conducting a witch hunt.
"The only way for a woman to get the justice that she seeks — and that, if her allegation is true, that she deserves — is to come forward [immediately]," Pressley told Marc Lamont Hill. "And even if the reasons that the women did not do that are legitimate ones, what cannot happen — in my opinion, in the United States — is that 40 years later there is a persecution tantamount to a witch hunt where there was no prosecution timely and there was no civil suit timely. And there's not any testimony or any accusation from any of these women that Mr. Cosby in any way bound them, gagged them, prevented them from coming forward and saying whatever their truth was at the time. That's not what happened."

Pressley was responding to the latest cover of New York magazine, on which 35 of Cosby's alleged victims appear.
Each woman's story is essentially the same: Bill Cosby drugged them and then either raped or sexually assaulted them. Cosby has previously claimed that he is a "pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things," claiming all sexual activity between him and his alleged victims was consensual. However, one of his accusers, Andrea Constand, has argued that if he were such a good "reader of people," he'd have known she was a lesbian.
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"Mr. Cosby, as of today, is innocent until proven guilty," Pressley said on CNN. "And there shall not be proof, because the statute of limitations has passed. People waited far too long to want to discuss these matters at all. So where we stand right now is with people attempting to do through media and through public opinion what they cannot do and have failed to do in a court of law."
She doubled down on that argument during her interview with the Huffington Post.
”I'm not speculating, I'm not thinking, I'm not opining, I'm not waxing poetic, but what I'm saying is women have responsibility. We have responsibility for our bodies, we have responsibility for our decisions, we have responsibility for the way we conduct ourselves," she said.
Pressley clarified that she was not victim-blaming, dismissively calling the term "a hashtag."
Pressley also stated in no uncertain terms that Cosby himself would not be addressing the New York magazine story.